"It don't matter what we do, so long as we're all together": That recipe for a wonderful Christmas comes to you from Paula Deen  doyenne of down-home cooking, Food Network host with that remarkably rich twang, and head of a growing (and unapologetically Southern-fried) lifestyle empire.

It's that expanding enterprise that keeps Deen away from her Savannah home six months of the year, by her count. Which means that in recent years, she's had to cut some Christmas preparation awfully close to the big day. "Last year, I was left with just six days to get ready," she says, sitting in a New York City hotel suite, sharing a pot of coffee and a stack of molasses cookies ("Ya gotta dip one, really soak it in the coffee  mmm!") with me; her younger son, Bobby; and her husband, Michael Groover.

Just as she is on TV, in person Deen is ebullient and loquacious  so prone to never leave out the smallest detail (a habit just as valuable to bakers as to storytellers) that the family refers to soft-spoken Groover's rendition of certain stories as "the USA Today version." Here, she shares some of her favorite holiday memories  and her most irresistible cookie recipes. And be warned: You will be very, very hungry when you finish reading these tales of a Paula Deen holiday.

A Taste of Christmas Past

Not surprisingly, some of Deen's earliest and most magical Christmas memories involve food. But instead of sugarplums dancing in her head, there were gumdrop trees. During her childhood in Albany, GA, her mother, Corrie Hiers, would take a thistle bush and stick gumdrops on the ends of its thorny branches  a tradition Deen always adored.

Every winter growing up, she knew that the holidays were getting close based on one special treat emerging from the oven. "Every year my Grandmother Paul would make the Japanese fruitcake  how it got that name, I don't know  and Mama used to make it, too. I always knew when I saw it that Christmas was only a few days away." This confection was "alternating layers of spice and yellow cake, with filling of pineapple and coconut and maraschino cherries, and nothing like the traditional fruitcake we think of," she recalls almost dreamily. Deen still makes the cake but lately has been adding a layer of divinity frosting. "There's no telling how many calories are in that cake! Michael says it's too sweet. I say, 'Are you out of your mind?'" she says with mock indignation.

Of course, presents hold a treasured place in her memories, too: Deen particularly remembers the Christmas when she was 5 or 6  "the last one before my brother, Bubba, was hatched," she says. She had suffered a terrifying accident just days before the holiday: When she was playing in the yard at a friend's house, a ladder fell away from the house and hit her on the head. "I've got a picture of that Christmas morning somewhere, and I got a big old bald patch on my head, because they had to shave the top of my head for stitches," she says, laughing. "I think my parents were so happy I was alive; that's why I got everything I wanted. I remember going into that living room, and what all did I get? I got a bicycle. I got my Mary Hartline doll. Oh, my goodness, it was a bunch of stuff, and it was all too good to be true!"